Las flores del vicio

I was in Spain when this was filmed with my family. The film was shot in the town of Mojacar in the early 1970's. I met most of the actors and knew Silvio Narizzano and his partner Winn Wells personally since they lived down the street from our home. My parents owned a bar/restaurant called El Saloon and all the actors spent a great deal of time in their establishment during filming. My brother was cast as the mentally challenged child who was stomped to death in the plaza as a woman looked on from a balcony.

I clearly remember the shot, however I have never seen the movie as I was quite young at the time. I would like to obtain the movie (dvd, video). If anyway can tell me where to purchase that would be great.

Thank you.

One of the undeniable pleasures of compulsive movie-watching is discovering obscure stuff such as this one which not only managed to rope in a surprising number of talents but the end result is so oddball as to make one wonder how it ever came to be written, shot and distributed!; indeed, in comparison to the stream-of-consciousness nature of the film under review, the same director's would-be arty Western BLUE (1968; which I have just watched) seems like a walk in the park!

For leading man Dennis Hopper (called "Chicken" here!), it was no big stretch to play this after his self-directed THE LAST MOVIE (1971) and TRACKS (1977) – what is more, he seems to have kept his APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) look for it – nor, for that matter, appearing as a junkie. For his co-star, too, Carroll Baker – here sending up her own image of a has-been Hollywood diva (dubbed "Treasure" in her case!), it was basically a continuation of her "Euro-Cult" outings of a few years earlier. Way-past-his-prime Richard Todd, however, must have kicked himself for accepting to appear in such a 'depraved' film, where he has to call his hard-drinking suicidal wife a "bitch", gay hanger-on Alice a "whore", and is even seen ogling an Oriental girl about 40 years his junior! Todd's wife is Faith Brook, an unknown name to me but, looking up her resume' to IMDb, she has been featured in films as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock's SUSPICION (1941), Joseph Losey's THE INTIMATE STRANGER (1956) and Anthony Mann's THE HEROES OF TELEMARK (1965)! With respect to the transvestite, apparently the actor was himself so inclined, since he went by the name of Win(ifred) Wells: actually, it was the latter who supplied the script and that of another strange Narizzano film i.e. the Italian-made REDNECK (1973)!

What plot there is essentially develops into a quartet of couplings: Hopper with a good-looking blonde, Baker with a bland-looking macho (who's almost always stark naked), Todd with the afore-mentioned Asian and Wells with a black stud (unflatteringly referred to as "Turd")! For what it is worth, a fleeting character in the film announces herself as "Carrie Nation", but whether this was a direct nod to the pop group at the center of Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) is hard to tell under the circumstances! Anyway, all four protagonists come to a sticky end: WWII vet Todd goes willingly before a firing-squad, spurred on by his girl, in full official regalia(?!) – his wife is thus left alone; Wells is gored by a bull in his lover's shack (how the animal came to be there is anybody's guess); Baker is drowned in a pool following an orgy; and Hopper stumbles dead on the beach, having shot up once too many (he frequently hallucinates about his parents, with whom he seems to have had an oedipal relationship – worshipping his mother while hating his evangelist father).

The rest is a semi-improvised wallow in hedonism: this Spanish production bore the original title LAS FLORES DEL VICIO – which, translating to THE FLOWERS OF VICE, links it with Jose' Ramon Larraz' no less outrageous THE COMING OF SIN (1977); the BLOODBATH moniker, then, is hilariously misleading and, for the record, the film is also known as THE SKY IS FALLING (an appropriately bleak line in a song Baker is constantly crooning). In fact, it is overflowing with local color in the form of peasants' toil-ravaged faces and solemn religious rites, to say nothing of violence – animals being nonchalantly slaughtered or beaten and, in the best (if tellingly irrelevant) sequence, the Bunuelian image of a child getting trampled by a crowd (even if we had already witnessed the discovery of the same kid's drowned body!). That is not forgetting the expected moments of Hopper lunacy: notably, squashing a handful of eggs early on squarely in the face of his black lover and then forcing her to sing a traditional 'from the old plantation' tune(!) and a remarkable dialogue exchange by the sea-side between him and his latest partner, which I quote verbatim: "You look beautiful like that" – "What?" – "I said 'You look beautiful like that'" – "I can't hear you" – "I said 'I wanna rape you'!" – "Then you should!"

Lovers of gonzo movies must sooner or later stumble across the wild and wonderful career of Dennis Hopper. His most interesting and "out there" period is also his least discussed. The so-called "lost decade" from roughly The Last Movie to Apocalypse Now. During this time he wasn't constantly working but he did make movies like Kid Blue, Tracks, Mad Dog Morgan and The American Friend, all due for reassessment. For my money the great lost Hopper performance can be found in Bloodbath (aka The Sky Is Falling), an obscure but worthwhile Spanish horror film. I use the term "performance" loosely because when watching his demented behaviour here you often get the feeling that much of what's on screen was probably similar to your typical day-in-the-life of Dennis in the Seventies! Hopper as Chicken hallucinates frequently, mumbles, rambles, freaks out, shoots up, makes love, quotes Hassan I Sabbah, and terrorises a poor girl by breaking a raw egg in her face and making her sing "Shortening Bread". Yup, it's that good. There are also some nice supporting roles from the zany ex-pats, especially the lovely Carroll Baker (Hopper's costar in Giant!) as a sad, faded Hollywood beauty queen still waiting for "that call" from the Studio.

A junky (Dennis Hopper), a retired Hollywood actress (Carroll Baker) and several other misfits live in a run down Spanish village. Suddenly they begin turning up dead! A strange and violent film, almost like an Italian "giallo" as if it were directed by Andy Warhol! I dug it!

BLOODBATH opens with a woman walking the world's ugliest pig. No, really, you've got to see this thing! Next, a woman pulls the head off of a chicken. We get the immediate impression that something wonky is going on here, since none of the locals seem to have been born with the ability to smile. That is, unless they happen to be leering maniacally.

In total contrast to this, a very non-twelfth century-looking woman appears, dressed in groovy threads. She enters a building where western music plays. Her name is Susanna (Alibe Parsons), and she's met by the heroin-filled, racial slur-spouting, Chicken (Dennis Hopper). They're part of a misfit group of expatriates, living together in this tiny, ultra-religious village in Spain, and they stick out like ballerinas in a bowling alley.

These two groups are set against each other, as scenes of a religious festival is intercut with the hedonistic frivolity of the foreigners. Does anyone see a catastrophic culture clash coming?

Enter the fun-loving ex-movie star, Treasure Evans (Caroll Baker). She's sort of a younger version of Nora Desmond, and another part of this oddball bunch of bananas, that includes an aging WWII General and a mega-flamboyant gay man. They're a family, clinging together in order to be themselves, in spite of their increasingly oppressive surroundings. We get the impression that none of them could survive alone.

When these exiles gather for a Good Friday celebration, their drunken revelry flies in the face of the solemn procession going on beside them. Things have been tense and creepy all along, and the atmosphere gets really thick from here on out!

Soon, the darkness, religious insanity, and death take over completely.

This is one of those wonderfully weird, disturbing films that could only have come out in the 1970's. Filled with bizarre situations and an overhanging sense of gathering, unstoppable doom, the horror bubbles up like a corpse in a bog!

Mr. Hopper is as good or better here than in many of his outings, playing it natural, and letting it fly! For those who've never seen him go absolutely berserk, well, he certainly does that here!

SOME NICE TOUCHES: Watch for the red telephone! And, what's up with the pregnant woman with the umbrella?...